From a small town in Mexico to the boardrooms of Big Pharma to main streets nationwide, comes an explosive and shocking account of addiction in the heartland of America. The 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award Winner for Nonfiction.
...a book that every American should read. And I state that without reservation ... Dreamland is the result of relentless research and legwork on the part of Quinones, as well as his talented storytelling. The opiate addiction epidemic was caused by a convergence of multiple, seemingly unrelated factors, and Quinones takes these narrative strands and weaves them together seamlessly ... This book is as much of a page-turner as a good mystery, as well as being thoroughly and disturbingly illuminating about a national crisis.
This is America in 2015, and as Sam Quinones describes in his astonishing, monumental new book...we’re in the midst of 'the worst drug scourge to ever hit the country,' measuring by its death toll ... Quinones takes readers over some of the terrain New York Times reporter Barry Meier mapped in his 2003 book on OxyContin, Pain Killer: A 'Wonder' Drug’s Trail of Addiction and Death ... Dreamland picks up the same threads that Meier explored, and Quinones’s chapter-long riff on OxyContin’s rise is a masterpiece. I would reprint here it in full, if I could; it’s that important and well reported ... The U.S. will never solve its deadly opiate epidemic if we don’t first admit we have a problem. And Dreamland is one of those rare books that’s big and vivid and horrifying enough to shake up our collective consciousness.
Every so often I read a work of narrative nonfiction that makes me want to get up and preach: Read this true story! Such is Sam Quinones’ astonishing work of reporting and writing ... Dreamland will be out in paperback in April. Think it doesn’t affect you? Check out the scene on Seattle’s Third Avenue, where any bus rider can see drug deals going down. Think of the stories you’ve heard of prescription-opiate addiction among bright young people with everything going for them. Think again — for better or worse, Dreamlandis a true American story.
